Six Skills for New Age Executives

Most business schools teach six fundamental managerial skills that supposedly insure success in today’s business world:
• Set goals and establish policies and procedures.
• Organize, motivate, and control people.
• Analyze situations and formulate strategic and operating plans.
• Respond to change through new strategies and reorganizations.
• Implement change by issuing new policies and procedures.
• Get results and produce respectable growth, profitability, and return on investment.

The Foundation of Excellence: Strategy and Culture

The marriage of strategic thinking and corporate culture building requires that leaders not only cultivate broad vision but master the skills to implement that vision. Such leaders see crisis as opportunity, not danger, and create a future equally responsive to the bottom line and to an organization’s people. We all know Detroit lost its preeminence in auto making by believing that “customers will drive whatever we build for them”, while Japanese car manufacturers rethought the automobile’s role in a changing world and designed a car better suited to that world. Now Toyota, not GM, dominates world markets with excellence. Transforming mediocre organizations into excellent ones, converting crisis into opportunity, and shaping vision into reality, demand more than theoretical formulas or quick fixes.

Shallow Thinking

Too much concentration on dousing the flames of daily crisis can drain the executive’s reservoir of creative energy and result in superficial or shallow thinking. Such thinking has triggered “low-risk” strategies vulnerable to more aggressive Japanese and European ones. It has spawned “market-driven” behavior that satisfies customer needs in the short run, but doesn’t produce new, superior products over time. Good business requires deep thinking; and deep thinking only comes from a deep and abiding commitment to success.

Create Excellence

Individual executives who have developed specific skills create superior organizational performance. Excellence doesn’t happen miraculously but springs from pace-setting levels of personal effectiveness and efficiency. Great business, government, and non-profit organizations owe their greatness to a few individuals who mastered leadership skills and passed those skills on to succeeding generations of executives and managers. With their unique skills they lead others along the pathway to excellence, carefully cultivating those who will later assume the controls. To groom future leaders successfully, the mentor makes sure he passes on both his gift for strategy and his flair for building a strong corporate culture.

No Pain, No Gain

Little of lasting value comes easily. Although at times ostensibly miraculous events seem to happen effortlessly, don’t be misled by superficial appearances. The achievement of excellence requires effort and at times, pain. The very process of confronting and addressing problems head-on calls forth our greatest effort, but only by expending our greatest effort can we win exceptional and durable skills. New Age executive might think of themselves as marathoners who must toil to prepare themselves to go the distance, surmounting all the obstacles that block their paths. Such marathon-distance managers recognize obstacles and problems as the very impetus of their own growth. But it’s not getting tougher, not easier, to create excellence. If we suffered at the hands of ruthless competition and our own complacency, we must suffer even more to win back dominance and aggressive leadership.